Sneak Peek: Honey!

I went out to do a thorough hive inspection today. I have been a little concerned about the bees because they seem to bunch around the opening after inspections, so I was thinking that they were maybe too crowded in just two medium boxes. A bunch of the folks I know in the San Mateo Bee Guild attended a class where the instructor suggested putting a new box on the bottom instead of the top so that the returning foraging bees have more space to come inside. So I put one more brood box on each hive - I put Thistle's on the bottom and Mint's on the top just to see if it made any difference (looks like it didn't):

I also put a top entrance on Thistle so they have more places to enter the hive (you can see them clustering around a small hole at the top, that's their new entrance).

Mint also built a lot of burr comb up in their feeder, so I took that out. It was filled up with nectar and honey, so I decided to try to bottle it. Here is the smashed honey comb with honey in my filter, the honey is dripping down through the filter into a cup, leaving all the wax and gunk out:

And here is the final product! Honey! It is very light in color because it probably has very high water content. The bees put nectar into the comb and fan it to evaporate the water. When the honey has the right water content, the bees cap the honey comb. Most of the honey that I took was uncapped, so it probably has more water than it should, it is still delicious though (this is about 1/2 cup of honey):

Visit from Padge and Heather

Today, Padge and Heather came to see the bees. They sat on the deck while I was doing the hive inspection, but they came up close to see a few things that I was pointing out. Here I am showing Mom and Heather some eggs, nectar, and pollen:

I also finally looked at the cardboard panel beneath my screened bottom boards this time, they were covered in cruft - it looked like mostly pollen that had fallen off of the bees, chewed out wax caps, and a bunch of squirming hive beetle larvae (gross). Padge, Mom and Heather came over to take a look:

I also put on my grease patties (that I had forgotten to put on in the last inspection). These are part crisco and part sugar sandwiched in between two sheets of wax paper. It helps guard against tracheal mites (I have no idea why):

And here is a really nice shot of a drone bee (boy bee) next to a worker bee (girl bee). The drone is on the right and has a larger body and huge eyes, the worker bee is on the left.

I was hoping that I'd be able to put a honey super on the Thistle hive, but they had only drawn out about 65% of their latest hive body. The Mint hive looked like it was only about 50% drawn. I did see a bunch of eggs in both hives, so I didn't bother looking in the bottom brood box..

For this inspection, I tried using a mixture of my new smoker fuels. I put in a few handfuls of cotton and a little handful of wood pellets. I didn't have to relight my smoker at all! This is the winning mixture for me, man I wish I knew about this last year.